Text, images and diagrams as information providers

Sara Verbrugge, University of Leuven, Belgium

Aurélie Stas, University of Leuven, Belgium

Koen Jaspaert, University of Leuven, Belgium

Abstract

We studied the effect of adjunct displays on recall in an
expository text (based on McCrudden, Schraw, Lehman, & Poliquin, 2007) in order
to find out which means of display aided pupils in the last years of secondary
school to recall information. We included four conditions in the experiment: text
only, text and causal diagram, text and images and causal diagram only.
Participants were checked for their recall of main ideas and causal sequences.
Recall for main ideas did not vary significantly across conditions. Contrary to
McCrudden et al., our results for the causal sequences revealed that participants
who studied a causal diagram only could recall more steps from causal sequences
than participants in any of the other conditions. We will interpret the findings
in the light of the literature on redundancy effects, dual coding theory, and the
causal explication hypothesis.